Consumers who fall for fake portfolios don't need a technology solution. They need a baseball-bat-to-the-head, and a new set of parents. Verifying that someone you are about to pay is worth paying ain't much of a challenge. You're welcome to take the gamble when you want to live life on the edge, but when you want to make an intelligent decision about a person that you hire, it never comes down to a technological solution. It comes down to not being a moron. It was true two thousand years ago; and it's still true today.

Let me know if you need my help. If you're over the age of 20, be embarassed. If you own a house, be very embarassed. If you can't spell embarrassed after 34 years of learning, be a little embarassed!

Pinball, jazz, pirate radio, free-to-play games, and many many other readily-available forms of entertainment have done precisely that: they've corrupted social norms, minds, recreational pass-times, and priorities.

That's been the point all along.

Protecting the children is a perfectly valid reaction to any event or advance offering an easy-route through a scenario. In the case of free-to-play, it means being able to play games, socially, with friends, with no money, and no job. So if you've used expensive games to convince your children that they need a job to pay for things in life, then that simply won't fly anymore.

If that lesson (needing a job to pay for things to have things) is no longer relevant, then that's fine. But if it is still relevant, then free-to-play games do indeed make raising your children more difficult. How do you intend to teach them that money buys things if they don't need money for anything for what, two decades?

You aren't going to stop feeding them. And you won't (anymore) stop giving them a cell phone. So given a 15 year-old, going to high school, with a phone, free games, food, free school, and a bus pass, it's kind of difficult for them to want a job or career. What's the value of a job to a 15 year-old these days? It ain't movies anymore either.

You can like the corruption, I know I like most of it these days. But it's certainly corruption -- that's how society progresses quickly, within a single generation.

Since when does listening to 3-minute, or 55-minute performances count as a valid listening test? How about listening to the same song for three hours, and then judging whether or not you have a headache the next day?

There are loads of elements to "quality" that aren't easily identified conciously. That doesn't mean that they don't exist. That doesn't mean that they aren't beneficial. That simply means that you can't measure them in a blind listening test in under an hour.

And, of course, none of this takes into account what the violin ought to sound like. What a performer "prefers" has absolutely nothing to do with how the composer wanted it to sound. There are plenty of benefits to things that you don't like, especially when paired with many other sounds concurrently.

But hey, I heard a tamborene last week that had no trouble competing with a tuba and a drummer, without being amplified. It meant that the three instruments could be played off-stage, in the audience. Maybe that's a quality tamborene. Maybe it's not. But that's certainly not the type of attribute that would have been captured by any listening study such as these.

I love it. Geocities returns! MobileCities? I wonder if my very first web-page ever would come back. A thousand dollars says it'll work perfectly on mobile today, with not a single byte of HTML changed. v0.9 to v5.0 in only 2 decades!

Who said anything about netscape? Read harder please. Mobile app vs site is congruent to desktop application vs site.

And, quite frankly, the resolutions are exactly the same as they were too.

Put your name to your arguments, are I'm done with you.

Is anyone else caught in a flashback? Welcome back to the '90s. Same conversation, same observations, same decisions, same results.

Enjoy!

Dude, it's been four days. I don't even remember the conversation. But judging by the scores, others appear to be happy enough.

I look forward to our next discussion.

I'm the reason that you became an atheist perusing the internet. I'm one of the many who helped you to realize what you now know. I was an atheist before. The Internet is how I can procreate -- the internet is my crusading ground.

I'm not alone.